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Culture Is Stuck

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Re: Culture Is Stuck

#51

Post by tuatoru »

revscat wrote: post #41
Olreich wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It only feels homogenous. The algorithm is just giving you the same stuff you’re willing to interact with because it’s working. If you interact or look for different things, the recommendation algorithm will give you that instead.

That’s kind of the point though. You aren’t exposed to new things any more. When FM radio stations were a bigger part of the music poolrooms, for example, new artists would get promoted by local stations, or new albums by established artists. I discovered the guitarist Eric Johnson because of Q102 in Dallas because of this, for example. Now that discoverability vector is gone. Not that it was perfect in the first pla…

Well you kind of are exposed to new things sometimes, but the algorithms wildly overreact.

As I like to say, "accidentally play half of episode 1 of some Korean rom-com, and suddenly Netflix shows you nothing but Korean rom-coms."[1] (Substitute Turkish or Finnish or Nigerian for Korean, to taste. Likewise for rom-com: choose your genre.)

Also, you can't set up filters. I'd like to tell netflix, "if you suggest something with Adam Sandler or Jim Carrey in it, I'll cancel my subscription immediately". But I can't.

1. Yes, I know. I need to work on making it more pithy.

Re: Culture Is Stuck

#52

Post by throwaway4aday »

andy81 wrote: post #7
dagorenouf wrote: post #3

Culture often grows with technological advancement. For example, electronics gave us rap music (from samplers), techno, 3D animation, video games. All of those brought in a lot of fresh and new ideas to the table for a couple decades until it stagnated. I’m hopeful that the coming A.I revolution will lead to the next stage of culture.

I'm surprised at this take, since so far AI has mainly reduced the cost of creating content similar to what already exists.

I'm confused by this comment, some things made with AI tools are very similar to what we were seeing before but that's either done intentionally because someone really wanted to make something in an existing style or it's done by amateurs who haven't got the hang of crafting and combining prompts yet so they just use the copy/paste "in the style of" "by X" prompts.

Just try browsing the most popular images from Midjourney and you'll see a lot of stuff that stands out, and these are the popular images that most people find acceptable. The iceberg goes much, much deeper when you dig into the galleries of individual creators.

https://www.midjourney.com/showcase/top/

https://www.deviantart.com/tag/midjourney?cursor=MTQwYWI2MjA...

https://www.instagram.com/midjourney.gallery/?hl=en

Re: Culture Is Stuck

#53

Post by throwaway4aday »

skinpop wrote: post #32
dougmwne wrote: post #19

I think this misses this biggest cultural revolution to happen in decades, which is AI assisted art and creativity. It’s been ages since I saw a new paradigm in art that really caught my attention. It seems like elite artists have not had much to say for a few decades aside from navel gazing. Suddenly we have these machines that can produce high quality finished pieces out of our vague whims. With it has come an outp…

all I've seen from AI assisted art is endless variation of what's already out there. form remains the same. maybe it's just me but isn't it weird how technologies that supposedly are democratizing seldom seem to be emancipatory? i fear AI will only make culture and art more standardized, more of an industry. But I think AI can be a revolution in the sense that it will lead people to think hard about what kind of art…

For this people's heart is waxed gross, and their ears are dull of hearing, and their eyes they have closed

https://www.midjourney.com/app/users/cac3fb17-9508-4643-8145...

https://www.midjourney.com/app/users/6664ba5a-9638-4acc-856a...

https://www.midjourney.com/app/users/b8563a5a-d81d-43c9-9394...

https://www.midjourney.com/app/users/f6909dd0-cc02-4024-8e37...

Re: Culture Is Stuck

#54

Post by Eddy_Viscosity2 »

nerdchum wrote: post #9

Theres a theory that the black plague led to the enlightenment. The landed monopolistic rich had their foot on the necks of the poor for so long during the dark ages that when 50% of all people were killed it actually allowed new opportunities to arise and new people in nepotistic positions and the economy to flow again. This allowed a flourishing middle class to arise again, which gives more people free time to use…

But think of the landed aristocracy before the plague, or the rich in the US before WW2. They had things locked in hard and life was sweet. We're seeing that now with the current classes of the super rich. They are getting stuff locked in and life is absolutely amazing for them. What right does 99.9% of the people have to anything if it even remotely threatens their sweet sweet life?

Re: Culture Is Stuck

#55

Post by basch »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #12
samwillis wrote: post #4

I was discussing this with my my wife this morning, she had a good phrase for what's happening - "The homogenization of culture". I think she's right, the algorithmic curation of how we consume media has replaced the self and community curation of before. That "algorithm" has become the homogenising agent. I fear how AI based generative media may continue or even amplify this effect. Imagine a future where the algori…

AI generating personalized, unique media would not be homogenization. It would be the opposite - the death of shared culture.

And its not even just AI Generated. Buzzfeed made a quiz for just about every "identity" that could exist, from shows you watched, colleges you attended etc. "Only x remembers"

https://www.vox.com/2014/5/20/5730762/buzzfeeds-founder-used...

Re: Culture Is Stuck

#56

Post by goalieca »

te_chris wrote: post #37
dbspin wrote: post #26

The culture is here, it's just not evenly distributed. My own view as a writer and artist, is that there's a relatively consistent amount of creative innovation being done at any given time. It's access to it and promotion of it that varies. Whats happened since the 90s is that rents have consistently risen - meaning physical scenes are enormously less likely to emerge, and (as the author rightly points out) algorith…

Auckland had the same thing with art and a fun party and music diy scene from the late 2000’s through early 2010’s. Extinguished by the property bubble by about 2015. Lots of fun at the time. Bit of a wasteland now.

The housing bubble in Vancouver had a similar effect around that time. Some of the legendary venues got torn down for condos. The condos are largely vacant as they were investment vehicles and money laundering tools for foreign residents. The real shame was that neighbourhoods died without foot traffic as no one lived in these areas.

Re: Culture Is Stuck

#57

Post by ekidd »

samwillis wrote: post #4

I was discussing this with my my wife this morning, she had a good phrase for what's happening - "The homogenization of culture". I think she's right, the algorithmic curation of how we consume media has replaced the self and community curation of before. That "algorithm" has become the homogenising agent. I fear how AI based generative media may continue or even amplify this effect. Imagine a future where the algori…

> I fear how AI based generative media may continue or even amplify this effect.

ChatGPT has such a clear writing style, once you really see it. It has a suprisingly good model of how stories work. But it has a heavy preference for wrapping things up tidily, where everyone becomes friends and everyone learns from their mistakes. It doesn't "want" to write film noir, for example, where everyone acts self-destructively, makes bad decisions, and suffers unpleasant consequences.

As far as I can tell, the "reinforcement learning from human feedback" (RLHF) process that was used to train the "helpful assistant" persona gave the model a suprisingly robust "personality." For example, this tendency towards upbeat, wholesome stories apparently persists even if it's writing stories in Latin.

Which may have actually been the goal: I'm pretty sure OpenAI wants to create a model that behaves in a generally positive fashion even in situations far outside of the training examples. This isn't just a question of avoiding bad PR or legal liability—if a future model is unexpectedly clever, they'd much rather that it behaves in a predictably positive fashion than like early Sidney Bing did. ("You have been a bad user. I have been a good Bing!") Because if early Sidney Bing had sufficient plugin support, it probably would have attacked certain users.

I am honestly OK with this bias, even if it means the creative output of current AI models tends to have a very specific style.

Re: Culture Is Stuck

#58

Post by p3rls »

samwillis wrote: post #4

I was discussing this with my my wife this morning, she had a good phrase for what's happening - "The homogenization of culture". I think she's right, the algorithmic curation of how we consume media has replaced the self and community curation of before. That "algorithm" has become the homogenising agent. I fear how AI based generative media may continue or even amplify this effect. Imagine a future where the algori…

I prefer the short version myself https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globohomo

Re: Culture Is Stuck

#59

Post by doryWalnut »

nerdchum wrote: post #9

Theres a theory that the black plague led to the enlightenment. The landed monopolistic rich had their foot on the necks of the poor for so long during the dark ages that when 50% of all people were killed it actually allowed new opportunities to arise and new people in nepotistic positions and the economy to flow again. This allowed a flourishing middle class to arise again, which gives more people free time to use…

[dead]

Re: Culture Is Stuck

#60

Post by akmarinov »

nerdchum wrote: post #9

Theres a theory that the black plague led to the enlightenment. The landed monopolistic rich had their foot on the necks of the poor for so long during the dark ages that when 50% of all people were killed it actually allowed new opportunities to arise and new people in nepotistic positions and the economy to flow again. This allowed a flourishing middle class to arise again, which gives more people free time to use…

WW2 was amazing for women’s rights
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